Field of Invention
The present invention generally relates to telecommunications and specifically to telecommunications authentication.
Related Art
Telecommunications services are commonly delivered on a household basis, rather than an individual basis. For example, telephone, television, and internet access are all traditionally delivered to a subscriber household, and all members of that subscriber household enjoy those services. Typically, these services are delivered on an unlimited basis. That is, each subscriber household may use most or all of the services as much as desired, at flat-rate pricing.
As delivery of these traditional home-based services expand and extend beyond the “household” to various portable devices or to remote locations such as an office or hotel room, difficulties arise in ensuring that the services are limited to members of the household and are not inappropriately shared beyond a subscribing household. For example, as internet service providers enabled multiple email addresses per subscriber account, to support multiple household members, and as cell phone providers introduced family plans to support families with multiple cell phone users, they faced the problem of ensuring that the users of these services were actually members of the household associated with a particular “account.”
Traditionally, users have been authenticated via credentials including, for example, username and password, or by possession of an authorized device, such as a cell phone with a specific EIN. However, there has been no practical mechanism to validate that the user is actually a member of a subscribing household. Because usernames and passwords may be shared with non-subscribers or become compromised, it is desirable to provide further authentication.
Some service providers have imposed an arbitrary limit on the number of sub-accounts that may be associated with a subscriber household. For example, internet service providers limit the number of email addresses that may be created, and cell phone providers limit the number of phones that may be added to a family share account. This approach may be too restrictive, as in the case where a family of six or more is unable to obtain a phone for each family member on a cellular family plan limited to at most five phones. The approach may also be too permissive, as in the case of a three-person family, which could surreptitiously add additional “family share” phones to its account for friends who aren't actually members of the household.
Some service providers attempt to prevent sharing of service by preventing multiple simultaneous logins. However, this approach cannot prevent coordinated sharing of credentials by multiple users. The problem continues to grow as portable and mobile data and video services become increasingly prevalent.
Existing approaches lack a mechanism to validate actual membership within a subscribing household, and instead impose arbitrary limits intended to limit the impact of inappropriate service sharing while adequately serving the majority of participating households. What is needed is an approach that more effectively validates that a given user is actually a member of the subscribing household with which his or her service is associated.